Attacks on Rice make you think election still going on

Do race and gender bias fuel the raging Senate fight that has erupted for remarkably little reason over United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice's possible nomination to be secretary of state? I think not. If anything is standing in the way of this highly qualified African-American woman, it is cronyism.

By Clarence Page

recordnet.com

By Clarence Page

Posted Dec. 4, 2012 at 12:01 AM

By Clarence Page

Posted Dec. 4, 2012 at 12:01 AM

» Social News

Do race and gender bias fuel the raging Senate fight that has erupted for remarkably little reason over United Nations Ambassador Susan Rice's possible nomination to be secretary of state? I think not. If anything is standing in the way of this highly qualified African-American woman, it is cronyism.

Washington is a lot like high school. You have your in-crowds, your misfits and everybody in between. All jockey for some swag and sway with the Big Man on Campus, better known as the president, whom everyone also would be delighted to replace.

As President Barack Obama's potential nominee comes under increasing fire, despite a glaring emptiness to the arguments against her, Senate Republicans have taken a conspicuous liking to another name on the president's shortlist, Sen. John Kerry. The Massachusetts Democrat comes from the other party but, as a senator, like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used to be, he's one of their own.

And as Rep. Marcia Fudge, D-Ohio, incoming chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, said of Rice's GOP critics: "It is a shame that any time something goes wrong, they pick on women and minorities."

After all, she noted, "Susan Rice's comments didn't send us to Iraq and Afghanistan. Somebody else's did." True. But let us not forget that Republicans were delighted with another black woman who played a high-profile role in the run-up to those wars.

Some of us still remember the scary warnings by then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, no relation to Susan, on a Sunday talk show in September 2002. She talked of Iraq-bound shipments of "high-quality aluminum tubes that are only suited for nuclear weapons programs" and how "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

That chilling news turned out to be bogus after it spurred us into a questionable war. Yet it did not stop Rice's rise to become President George W. Bush's secretary of state.

Now two GOP senators who defended Condoleezza Rice's nomination to that job, Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, lead an offensive against Susan Rice over a far more understandable and, for her, forgivable intelligence snafu than the chain of errors that pulled the U.S. into the Iraq war.

On Sunday talk shows after the September terrorist attack that killed four Americans, including, Ambassador Chris Stevens, at the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, Susan Rice said that "based on the best information we have to date" the attacks began "spontaneously" in response to an inflammatory anti-Islam video that triggered riots in Cairo and elsewhere.

She also said "extremist elements" then joined the attack, although she did not directly mention terrorism or a suspected al-Qaida affiliate. For that omission, she has been accused of shading the truth to help Obama's re-election bid, although that notion is supported by far more suspicions than actual evidence.

Which only makes the language get more heated. At one low point McCain called the Rhodes scholar and seasoned diplomat "troubling" and "not very smart." He later softened his tone. Maybe somebody reminded him that, as the 2008 GOP presidential candidate, he proposed Sarah Palin to sit just one heartbeat away from the presidency? Now, that's troubling.

Congress can redeem itself by focusing on who deleted the terrorist group references from Rice's talking points before she went on the talk shows? CIA, State Department and FBI officials point fingers at one another. Yet GOP senators remain "obsessed," as Obama's press secretary Jay Carney put it, with Rice.

More important: Why was security in Benghazi so lax despite repeated requests for beefed-up protection? Why were American rescue troops stationed so far away? None of these critical issues was the responsibility of the U.N. ambassador. Yet, GOP senators make her the big headline. Is the election over yet?